Part 18 (1/2)

Townsend, as far as I remember, never talked about the ethics of journalism or the duties of the journalist It must not be supposed for a moment that this was because he did not realise or respect those duties, or was indifferent It was rather due to the fact that he had a kind of innocence, a _sancta simplicitas_, on this as, indeed, on many moral and social questions He took sound and honourable behaviour as a ht of praising other people or hi a strict sense of honour in their conduct of a newspaper than he would of praising the petty larceny, perjury, or fraud He took, indeed, a very hopeful view of mankind and did not the least believe they were really bad, even if they did show theers on occasion For instance, I reaiety which was peculiar to hireat deal in y they never had any differences as to the line the paper should take Though Hutton inclined to an extreht be described as a kind of sublimated sacerdotalism, and Townsend to a Broad Church Presbyterianism, buttressed by an intense opposition to every form of priestly function, he went on to point out that everything was made easy ”because both Hutton and I are at heart on the side of the angels”

Apropos of angels, I reht one of Townsend's s In the course of a conversation which began on some mundane theme and drifted on to spiritual lines, I re the noble horse of dialectic on to his haunches with the catastrophic reels, they have edges” Here was the whole man The idler or the fool will think, or pretend to think, that this was simply ridiculous nonsense, and will pass on with the coreat deal of good sense packed under a kind of se dictuels, they were not vague, fluid, evanescent creatures, soelic reservoir and sole samples, but definite personalities His was only a fierce and violent way of saying what Tennyson said so exquisitely in the immortal lines:

Eternal form shall still divide The eternal soul from all beside, And I shall know him e e The edge, the dividing- line, is the essential thing in individuals, and Townsend's mind had pounced upon this as a cat will fall like a thunderbolt upon a mouse It was in this vivid, practical way that his s and came out with the essential in his mouth But those who had slow or atrophied nise what he was after, or what a clever kill he had made

CHAPTER XVIII

MY LIFE IN LONDON IN THE 'NINETIES

I have described how I came to London, how I became established at _The Spectator_ Office, and what, before I succeeded to the Editorshi+p of _The Spectator_, were my various _extra_ activities in journalis of my personal life

In 1887 I married The year or so spent in my father-in-law's house, 14 Cornwall Gardens, where htful As my people lived either in Somersetshi+re or on the Riviera, I knew ”on h those I did knoere for the most part people to whom special interest was attached

It happened thatperson in herself, but, partly owing to a natural gift for, and love of, Society, and partly owing to the fact that her father, Mr

Nassau-Senior, the conversationalist, had been one of the best-known men in the political-literary world of London and of Paris, frouished men and women of the middle Victorian epoch By this I , Leslie Stephen, Mr Justice Stephen, Sir Mountstuart Grant-Duff, Sir Louis Mallet, Mr Lecky, Lord Arthur Russell and his brothers--to choose a few names almost at random The last- named, Lord Arthur Russell, was theconscious of it theuished wife forht call the centre of a social group

I shall, for this reason, choose the Arthur Russells for description in detail They were very old friends of the Nassau-Seniors and so of Mrs

Simpson, and friends with a double liaison Mr Nassau-Senior and his fahout his life on very friendly terms with Lady Williaency and Victorian London as regards her beauty, her intellectual ability, and her social qualities When Byron wrote the graceful and lively stanza which so audaciously recoilded youth, ant to knohether their partners' coht of dawn coh the ballroom s and then note what it discloses, he breaks off to say that, at any rate, there is one lady ill always stand the test, and adds:

At the next London or Parisian ball You're sure to see her cheek outbloo all

That lady was Lady William Russell--sister, by the way, of the unhappy Lady Flora Hastings so cruelly caught in the ue based on the natural, nay, inevitable, ignorance and want of worldly knowledge of a girl-Queen, the stupidity and lack of worldly wisdo bitterness of a group of Great Ladies--the whole assisted and inflamed by the baser type of party-politician

Lady Williareat, yet important parts in the world The eldest becah he lived in many ways a sequestered, alular ability Of him Joont to record a curious piece of private history The Duke had said to him, that in the course of his life he had lived upon all incoory had been happy and contented

Perhaps the best way to describe Hastings, Duke of Bedford, is to say that he was a typical Russell, though a man with a Melbourne-like mind would perhaps add that his untypicalness was theabout him The next brother was Lord Odo Russell, who played a very distinguished, brilliant, and useful part in the diplomacy of the period marked by the rise first of Prussian and then of German power His son is the present Lord Ampthill The third son was Lord Arthur Russell All three boys were brought up in what ht be called a nursery or schoolroom friendshi+p with the children of the Nassau-Senior family My hout her life; but her special friend, partly because he always lived in England, and partly because heMr Nassau-Senior's Parisian friends was the brilliant and distinguished Mlishwouished French family, who occupied an official post in the post-Restoration Adroup of Liberals of which Tocqueville was one of the roup which fron to the break-up of the Third Empire coht together even in the city of Paris--the natural horoup of which M and M orna lad to say I knew, and whose talk was to nant, free, brilliant, and yet never pedantic or laboured, and, above all, never trivial, Mme de Peyronnet's conversation was a perpetual source of joy to all who had the good fortune to know her and the ability to understand her She had three daughters, who all inherited their hters one, as I have said, lad to say, lives in full intellectual vigour, entleman” of the middle Victorian period Except for his perfect randiloquence or poht have stepped out of Disraeli's novels, or let us say an expurgated edition froarity and false-taste had been eliminated and only the picturesqueness and cleverness retained The third sister, Mlle, de Peyronnet, never married, but reoing to imitate the pomposity of Lord Beaconsfield, which I have just denounced, by talking nonsense about _Salons_, the Eighteenth Century, or of the spirit of Main in these fascinating women I am content to take them as they were and quite prepared to believe that they were not only very much nicer women, but also quite as able and quite as brilliant as those whom the spirit of Convention would be sure to nah they took a natural and proper interest in history, it never for a moment crossed the minds of any of theime_ or to imitate them in any sort or way They were as natural and unsophisticated as they were incisive, intrepid, and aood fortune to hear better talk than that which flowed so easily froo, still flows What struck me most was the way in which anecdote, recollection, and quotation, though not frigidly or formally dismissed, kept a subordinate place in the talk and had to inal, personal, and therefore in a high degree sti of the flavour of the second-hand or of hearsay, however good

I had been accustomed as a boy to hear the best type of what I lish conversation, from the mouth of a master, Abraham Hayward Hayas an excellent example of the special type of _raconteur_ who first becaency period

These men, ere chiefly anecdotal in their talk, are well described by Byron in the i-bow fro-bow froh in a narrow sphere, and with a re stories of Byron, Melbourne, Castlereagh, Cobden, Bright, Peel, and later Gladstone, Palmerston, and Lord John and other ereat intensive force and was vivacious as well as concise All the same, the talk was anecdotal, and that can never be as sti as when it is spontaneous It was the difference between fresh e claret on the day it is uncorked and the day after

Do not let it be supposed that by this co that the talk of Mhters was naturalistic and so artless It was nothing of the kind Though original and spontaneous, it was the result, consciously or unconsciously, of a distinct artistic intention When they talked, they talked their best, as does the writer of good faent talker of the three, Lady Sligo the most reminiscent and, in the proper, not the derived sense, the most woman-of-the-worldly I reat world, but by no randiloquent, consequential, or Beaconsfieldian sense She had travelled a great deal and seen an enormous nuland, and, therefore, she was and is more cosmopolitan in her talk than were her sisters

Mlle de Peyronnet was thein a lightning-flash epigrams and _jeux de mots_ which would not have discredited the best wits even of France I think her repartee, or rather _jeu de mot_, at the dentist's, which went the round of London, the best example I can take by way of illustration

Most people are dreary and depressed in a dentist's chair Not so Mlle

de Peyronnet Even here she kept not only her good-teination and, above all, her verbal felicity

The scene passes in a Dental _Atelier_ in Paris Mlle de Peyronnetthe pain but hoping for the relief of an extraction But, as Tacitus said, that s cross and terrible The dentist, instead of doing his work deftly, bungled it, or else it was the fault of the patient's jaw At any rate, the tooth broke off in the forceps, and the dentist had to confess to his patient that all the pain he had given her was useless He had left in the root! ”_Ah, edie!_” But the patient, though suffering acute agony, orthy of the occasion She did not pause for an instant in her coedie de Racine!_”

There have been, no doubt, greater and deeper witticis have been happier, neater, ood-tempered, more exactly appropriate?